How we built a DIY book scanner with speeds of 150 pages per minute

A kit, online forums, and an Ikea-like manual made DIY scanning easier than expected.

Bookshelves today are simply not as appealing as they used to be, and there's no shortage of people looking to digitize their own book collections. Fortunately, we now have easy and relatively inexpensive ways to digitize those books. You don't have to slave away at your copier or scanner, either—we’re talking about building a book scanner of your very own.

We're not talking about the numerous book scanning services that have popped up in the last few years, offering book digitization at the cost of only a few cents per page. Nor are we talking about chopping off the binding of your book and feeding the pages into a copier or scanner, or purchasing a commercial book scanner for upwards of $10,000 (that just isn’t going to happen for most). No, we're talking toolbelts, paint cans, bike brakes, and digital cameras—doing it yourself.

For two law students interested in the legal and policy discussions surrounding copyright and technology, deciding to build a DIY Book Scanner was never just a project to digitize our own textbooks (however practical that might be). Instead, it gave us the opportunity to experience these issues first hand. Plus, we wanted to see what it would take to build one.

Unfortunately, we lacked engineering backgrounds. Fortunately... well, we have the Internet. We discovered the DIY Book Scanner Kit and the booming community of people building their own book scanners. At $475 instead of several thousand dollars, it felt like striking gold... if we could make it work.

Daniel Reetz, founder of DIYBookScanner.org, had been making kits available for those looking to build their own device. Finding a need for a scanner himself, Reetz built his first book scanner from the trash he found from dumpster diving. He created an Instructable to share his experiences and discovered a diverse group of individuals who also had the need for a book scanner. The group ranged from a man from Indonesia hoping to preserve books from flood damage to a group of engineers looking for a new and interesting project to spark their interests. The DIY Book Scanner had modest beginnings, but over a period of two years it evolved into a movement of individuals using readily available resources to create solutions.

Thanks to Reetz, the community of fellow DIY-ers, the generous funding from the Institute of Information Law and Policy at our New York Law School, and help from our mentor (and Arscontributor) Professor James Grimmelmann, we ordered a kit and got to work. Just how hard could it be?

Chapter one: Getting started

The DIY Book Scanner Kit came in a 23” x 27” x 7” cardboard box and weighed about 40 pounds. Inside, we found a neatly organized pile of wooden parts and hardware.

Sure, the description on the website stated, "First and foremost, this is a beta. It's not a consumer product like you might buy in a store. It requires that you Do Some Things Yourself!… If you're not a builder or tinkerer yet, this is a good place to start... Getting to a complete, working scanner will require some perseverance on your part."

But still, no instructions? Having assembled only cheap Swedish furniture before, we were consumers who expected some guidance. The Web description of the DIY Book Scanner Kit did throw us a lifeline, though. “The good thing is that there is a large community of people, including me (Daniel Reetz), who will help you at www.diybookscanner.org/forum,” it said. So when the package came, we headed back to the website and found a large community of people who posted about their experiences building the device. These writeups became key reference guides. We also downloaded a copy of some online assembly instructions, which were oddly reminiscent of the IKEA variety:

Jennifer Baek and Jake Brown-Steiner

The step-by-step instructions are 43 pages worth of computer renderings covering each part in the kit. Instead of text, arrows point out where parts go. Fortunately, the drawings were easy to follow. When problems arose it quickly became second nature to consult the community (which we did without hesitation).

We started by painting each of the wooden pieces with matte black latex paint. Since we couldn’t paint at the law school, we hauled the kit out to Brooklyn (fitting for DIY Book Scanner maintenance) before getting down and dirty with the brushes.

Jennifer Baek and Jake Brown-Steiner

Jennifer Baek and Jake Brown-Steiner

The wood absorbed the paint like a sponge and dried in a manner of minutes. We finished painting in a few hours, after which we packed up the kit and took it back to its home in the Collaboratorium (an office in the Institute of Information Law and Policy where awesome things tend to happen).

Jennifer Baek and Jake Brown-Steiner

There, we received an e-mail from Professor Grimmelmann about the release of Robin Sloan’s new novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Robin had found out about the book scanner we were building and wanted us to bring it to the Center for Fiction for a segment of his live 24-hour webcast in three days. The talk would take place in the run-up to his book release party. The odds of completing our project by then were not good, but we decided to try. (How could we pass up that opportunity?)

On the first day, we began assembling pieces, often bickering about how deep we needed to drill pilot holes. Self-doubt struck when screws broke off or bits of wood started to split. (Tip: Make sure you drill the pilot holes deep enough to house a screwhead and far enough from the edge of the wood to prevent splitting). Parts got stuck or didn’t fit together, forcing us to make five separate trips to the local hardware store for extra supplies. (Tip: Only paint the surface of the parts; don’t paint the slots where the wooden pieces fit together. Also make sure you have lots of sandpaper and a file handy, as you will need to sand down slots to make sure the pieces fit together well.)

By the end of day one, we were ready to assemble all of the wooden parts. On day two, we worked on getting what we called the “camera trigger mechanism” to work. The “camera trigger mechanism” consists of a dual-cable bicycle brake lever, two cables, and pieces of wood that were laser-cut to produce something with an uncanny resemblance to the human index finger. To assemble the mechanism, we flipped to the next page of the instructions and discovered that they stopped short.

I was blown away by this until I realised they still had to turn each page by hand. Surely there's a way to get it to actually turn pages automatically as well? Something involving a sort of rubber rod roling from right to left?

I have to admit that while this looks interesting, and I do love ebooks (I love my physical books as well), the very thought of converting my library makes me cringe. All said (novels, reference, children's, everything) I probably have 1,800 or so books. At ~3min average per book, around 90 hours of scanning.

It wouldn't help with past purchases, but I think the publishers would do well to put codes in their printed books for the ebook version. The additional overhead, per book, would be pretty minimal and would drive sales of printed versions of high-demand series. I mean, if you like Wheel of Time, you might be willing to spend some extra $ to have printed copies of the books on your shelves even if you prefer ebooks.

I would also, were I publishers, put a bit more effort into having symbols or logos for various series, as well a trying to make the bindings within a series more uniform (or do like I've seen a few recently where the spine graphics, all stacked together, form a picture relevant to the series).

I was blown away by this until I realised they still had to turn each page by hand. Surely there's a way to get it to actually turn pages automatically as well? Something involving a sort of rubber rod roling from right to left?

This is great! This brings an affordable solution the hardest part of digitizing existing dead-tree prints (getting optics pointed at each page). With a bit of streamlining/tweaking, and pairing this device with a photo collating and OCR suite, more obscure or out of print books will make it into the digital age. For the longest time, I've been trying to find a digital copy of Earth Made of Glass (Thousand Cultures series) by John Barnes. For some reason the publisher decided to skip this one even though the other three books in the series have been digitized.

I'm unsure of the copyright implications of digitizing books where no digital version exists, but I would pay cash-money for that format shift. Perhaps some limited royalty/licensing agreements could entice the original publishers to let this happen.

This is stupid. Anything generating a pdf vs OCR character reading is a waste of time. This is literally book scanning for people who don't know shit.

I want perfect text in my books, *not pictures of text*.

Someone obviously didn't actually read, since they say the did use OCR software on the images.

That said, OCR brings a whole host of problems. How does it handle images? You have to read and proof EVERYTHING, adding enormous overhead.

It almost adds enough overhead that it would be faster to just use something like LaTeX and typeset it yourself. I did this once, long ago, to a book I wanted to send to a friend in another country, where the book wasn't yet published. Took about 2 days, which is only a bit longer than it took to read.

I was blown away by this until I realised they still had to turn each page by hand. Surely there's a way to get it to actually turn pages automatically as well? Something involving a sort of rubber rod roling from right to left?

I wonder how friction methods can be unreliable/ineffective though. I mean, printers have been able to pick up and move single pages from a stack for decades now. Adapt something like that, add a type of descending bar on the other side to keep the page from flipping back, and you're done, right?

Binding cutter + sheet-fed scanner is still a much better option for any commodity book, and not terribly expensive given the economies of scale. The lack of parallax and skew even an image adjusted picture would have make OCR a much more feasible option as well.

The personal time taken to order the images and setup the de-skew and enhance software along with construction and calibration of this rather bulky piece of equipment adds up to a much higher cost than a sheet-fed scanner. As a bonus, the scanner will more than likely include a software suite which handles the OCR and format export, including features like producing an image / vector based PDF with inline searchable text and similar.

Rebinding a book is trivial as well. You lose at most 1/16th of an inch of the margin shaving the binding glue. In the case of pricier paperbacks such as textbooks, you get the advantage of choosing to put the book in a much easier to open library style hardback binding. Thick paperbacks, and even cheaply produced hardbacks with have issues laying flat a proper fabric backed open binding does not.

The lack of instructions from the seller for the brake cable assembly is disappointing, though. Points off for not including them "because it was too hard to render the images"...WTF? Anyway, kudos for figuring it out.

I would have taken two rectangular pieces of plywood, routed an off-center groove down the long axis of both, then placed the cable in the groove and screwed the other piece on top, so the grooves aligned. You get good clamping with no crushing that way, because of the larger surface area along the cable. You could cut the grooves using a triangular (OK) or semi-circular (better, if the diameter is slightly smaller than the diameter of the cable) router bit, or a table saw if that's all you have.

Re: collating the photos into page number order -- can't this be done by the filenames? If your camera's like mine, it numbers each file sequentially -- what am I missing?

This struck me as remarkable too. I find it hard to believe that they can turn and flatten a page and pull the trigger in 0.8 seconds. Maybe with enough practice though... Is there a video of them doing this?

Yes, so why build a contraption to scan the damn thing any other way first? Are you people not grasping this concept?

Really whats happened here is a slew of work has been added instead of simply going OCR at the start.

And sorry to clue you in here, but while it does take work, that's how it's done. The rather huge ebook piracy scene should show you that.

Your hostile attitude is really off-putting.

On topic: seems a strange choice to use a big wooden finger to press the camera's shutter – an electronic cable release would be much more elegant, assuming you have a camera that supports one (i.e. pretty much any DSLR).

This is stupid. Anything generating a pdf vs OCR character reading is a waste of time.

There's nothing stopping you OCRing it afterwards, and on current-generation displays (particularly Retina iPad and 2560-wide monitors) photos of books are entirely legible. If what you want to do is read it, photos are enough; yes, they take up hundreds of megabytes rather than hundreds of kilobytes, but we've *got* hundreds of *giga*bytes. Photos of every page in every book on my hundred feet of bookshelf would fit on a pocket USB disc.

I was blown away by this until I realised they still had to turn each page by hand. Surely there's a way to get it to actually turn pages automatically as well? Something involving a sort of rubber rod roling from right to left?

On topic: seems a strange choice to use a big wooden finger to press the camera's shutter – an electronic cable release would be much more elegant, assuming you have a camera that supports one (i.e. pretty much any DSLR).

They may have gone this way to keep costs down. But it still seems inelegant.

Idea: since pretty much every point & shoot camera nowadays has automatic smile detection, could you trigger the camera by pushing a picture of someone smiling into the corner of the frame? At least then someone would get some mileage out of that gimmick.

I wonder how friction methods can be unreliable/ineffective though. I mean, printers have been able to pick up and move single pages from a stack for decades now. Adapt something like that, add a type of descending bar on the other side to keep the page from flipping back, and you're done, right?

Well, they pick up brand new unwrinkled sheets of paper from a stack that isn't connected to each other with a binding. And they still screw it up occasionally. Do the same thing on older wrinkled possibly uneven pages that are bound together, and you'd probably have a very different result.

I'm actually thinking through the photocopier/printer mechanisms in my head now. Don't they have a rubber roller that pulls the top sheet forward, while putting pressure and more friction below it, which prevents it from taking more than one sheet? If that's the way they're done, I can't see how that would work when you can't pull the sheet forward in any way.

That being said, I actually am now remembering an old (OLD) offset printing press I operated at one point. The way it worked was that there was a rotating arm with suction cups that had vacuum on them. The arm with the cups would press down on the top sheet, turn on the vacuum, and move up while a blower shot some air at the edge of the top few pages to make sure it was separated from the other sheets, then it moved to where the clamp on the press could pick it up and then turned off the vacuum so that it dropped the sheet and turned around to get the next page.

It was a remarkably cool piece of mechanical engeneering now I remember it, which is why I described it in detail. Some really cool machines were in that business.

Anyway, you could modify that kind of mechanism with the added complication of moving the vacuum arm out of the way when the pic is taken, but then the machine would cost much more than the $500 bux this one did, and closer to the $10k that the real machines cost and they already have that kind of mechanism, so it kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it?

While this is a really cool project if the question of format shifting and legality is already in question I'd much rather just use Calibre to strip DRM and do with what I will to purchased ebooks. Yeah I'm paying for them but once DRM is removed the book is mine and can't be edited or deleted by Amazon etc.

On topic: seems a strange choice to use a big wooden finger to press the camera's shutter – an electronic cable release would be much more elegant, assuming you have a camera that supports one (i.e. pretty much any DSLR).

They may have gone this way to keep costs down. But it still seems inelegant.

Idea: since pretty much every point & shoot camera nowadays has automatic smile detection, could you trigger the camera by pushing a picture of someone smiling into the corner of the frame? At least then someone would get some mileage out of that gimmick.

Inelegant? The big wooden finger is my favorite part - pure poetry.Sure, it could be done with some high-tech solution, but the finger has style, and works with nearly any camera.

If the idea was to save shelf space... wouldn't it be easier to cut the binding, run the pages through an ADF on a scanner and dump or file the pages where you are done?

It would be easier to pay somebody tens of thousands of dollars to take all your books offsite, scan/OCR them, proof them, and put them on your medium of choice.This, on the other hand, is fun. You should try it some time.

+10 for DIY and making a way to get more out of those $150 bullshit textbooks and returning them the day after purchase. Maybe textbook publishers will start thinking twice about choking students out of their cash and either offer reasonably priced digital editions and not reselling the same product as a "new" revision with only a couple words changed - cuz it's shit like that that makes consumers have less respect for publishers. Copyright ends where bullshit begins.

The manual moving of pages would be complicated because many of the books i have include photo pages which would be marred by physical touch with skin....you would have to wear gloves... which it the only way to handle them....but

I would LOVE to make digital copies of them...most are out of print the the publishers don't give a....

I'm actually thinking through the photocopier/printer mechanisms in my head now. Don't they have a rubber roller that pulls the top sheet forward, while putting pressure and more friction below it, which prevents it from taking more than one sheet? If that's the way they're done, I can't see how that would work when you can't pull the sheet forward in any way.

Drop the roller onto the right page, near the spine, have it roll towards the right edge (while keeping it in place). The page gets pulled in under the roller, and curls up until the right edge escapes from under the roller. Then have some sort of bar push it down. It seems doable, although, agreed, with new books.

As an aside, I love watching mechanical stuff like this in operation. I wish I knew more about it.

They may have gone this way to keep costs down. But it still seems inelegant.

For the low-end Canon and Pentax DSLRs, you can make your own cable release with a 2.5mm jack and some wires – the circuitry is really simple.

precambrian wrote:

Inelegant? The big wooden finger is my favorite part - pure poetry.Sure, it could be done with some high-tech solution, but the finger has style, and works with nearly any camera.

Yeah the finger is cool On the other hand, although it "works", it also introduces the possibility of camera shake → blur, which is probably not ideal if you're going to be OCRing the text. I guess it depends how solidly the camera's attached to the frame.

Former law student (now happily a lawyer) here. The authors should consider buying a full version of Acrobat. I realize that there are a lot of great open source packages out there, but after trying every single option, I have not found a more accurate OCR than the one found in Acrobat.

If you plan on doing any federal work, you will be operating entirely with PDFs. The OSS stuff is great for hobby projects or to incorporate in a script, but you'll never be able to bring it into the office. This isn't to say that there aren't outstanding OSS packages out there, but there aren't any in the PDF/OCR space that are as 1) stable, 2) accurate, or 3) feature-rich (PDF/A, digital signing, etc.) as the commercial packages.

This is stupid. Anything generating a pdf vs OCR character reading is a waste of time. This is literally book scanning for people who don't know shit.

I want perfect text in my books, *not pictures of text*.

Someone obviously didn't actually read, since they say the did use OCR software on the images.

That said, OCR brings a whole host of problems. How does it handle images? You have to read and proof EVERYTHING, adding enormous overhead.

It almost adds enough overhead that it would be faster to just use something like LaTeX and typeset it yourself. I did this once, long ago, to a book I wanted to send to a friend in another country, where the book wasn't yet published. Took about 2 days, which is only a bit longer than it took to read.

It's worth it if you are making a million digital copies of your results. Either way, how many pages was that book? It sounds like you're an incredibly fast reader. It always took me ages to get through a fiction book.